Seven years after his death, an unfulfilled idea of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy creator Douglas Adams is about to come to fruition, as the BBC prepares to bring unlikely detective Dirk Gently into the Hitchhikers universe in a new radio series. This strange move is a result of creative frustrations that led Adams to consider changing the unfinished third Dirk Gently novel (following on from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul) into a book from the Hitchhikers series.

The upcoming BBC radio adaptation of Long Dark Tea-Time will act, in part, as a bridge between the two series:

"There is definitely Hitchhiker's/crossover," explains Dirk Gently adapter-in-chief and director Dirk Maggs. "In this second series there is one particular idea from Douglas's notes for the third [unfinished] Dirk Gently book which at one point he thought might be a Hitchhiker's book. It's a very simple idea that puts one of the Hitchhiker's characters in the same universe as Dirk Gently in a way that I thought had enormous potential. In this series we find that the characters in both universes are inhabiting the same world, and I think where we're going with this is something that actually resolves later on in Hitchhiker's. It's turning into a bit of a prequel!"

The radio adaptation of the novel is due to be broadcast on UK BBC Radio 4 before the end of this year.